Reefer Madness

I'm burning a vacation day. I'm getting over a cold. When I do those things at the same time I just hang around the house and relax.

What's more relaxing than the sound of a camera's shutter clicking at regular intervals?

Nothing.

I made a couple of videos of my Lava Lite. (Well, the Lava Lite company now seems to call their product "Lava Lamp." I guess they decided if you can't beat them, join them.)

The first one was shot in the living room with a towel as its backdrop. It shows what a Lava Lite Lamp goes through in the hour and 45 minutes after it is turned on. I put my little clock next to it so you can see how long things are taking.

I shot it at a rate of one picture every three seconds. There are looooooong stretches of time where nothing really is happening (other than the clock spinning). So I have played back the static periods at 60 frames per second to get things moving. Where there is actual activity I play it at 15 frames per second.

The initial sploosh of the lava takes only five frames so there was no point in trying to slow that down. The lava just appears. When we're speeding up action, any action that starts out fast goes by in the blink of an eye. Sorry.


While I was recording the warm-up video, I watched other folks' YouTube time-lapse videos of Lava Lamps. I plagiarized a couple of their ideas and made a second video.

I hauled the Lava Lamp to the bedroom and put it on the dressing chest in front of the mirror. I lowered the black-out shade and fired things back up. The lamp had cooled down so it starts out with no action. I closed the door to keep the room as dark as possible (but the sun came out from the clouds and lights up the background). After a couple of hours I went back to check on things. There was no noise coming from the bedroom. The battery had died after a little more than an hour and a half.

Well, the single charge was used to capture last week's tide and all this lava action. I should have thought about the battery but I didn't. It's pretty impressive that a single charge of the battery can take more than 6200 shots that went into these movies.

Here is the Lava Lamp in the dark in front of the mirror. This one was shot one frame per second and played back at 24 frames per second.


And just because I can, here's an animated GIF of the frames where the lava makes its first out-of-the-body experience. You have to click on this thumbnail to see it in action.